


Tango

by Liara_90



Category: Red vs. Blue
Genre: Action/Adventure, Canon Compliant, Chorus (Red vs. Blue), F/M, Future Fic, Gun Violence, Hospitals, M/M, Other Kinds of Violence, POV Multiple, POV Third Person, Post-Canon, Slow Burn, glacially slow
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-11-06
Updated: 2019-08-04
Packaged: 2019-08-19 13:26:34
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 4
Words: 13,757
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16535417
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Liara_90/pseuds/Liara_90
Summary: tango(tæŋ.ɡoʊ)n.:A ballroom dance originating in Buenos Aires, characterized by marked rhythms and postures and abrupt pauses.(U.S.) NATO phonetic alphabet for the letter "T" and for "Target" (or enemy).Nobody ever said working together would be easy. Quite the opposite, in fact. They somehow ended up doing it anyways.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Park Place: Or, How Red Team Nearly Ceased To Be](https://archiveofourown.org/works/16476269) by [mantisbelle](https://archiveofourown.org/users/mantisbelle/pseuds/mantisbelle). 



* * *

“ _Tango-2 is moving to your position_ ,” the voice in his earpiece murmured, in clipped and cool tones. The voice was low, female, and had just a _hint_ of nervous energy bleeding into it. “ _No other movement_.”

Locus adjusted the magnification on his digital scope, zooming out slightly. And, sure enough, there was the man known only as Tango-2, a man blissfully unaware that he carried that designation and what that designation meant for his future. “Tango” had been military shorthand for “target” for a little over half a millennium, and despite a lack of mutual ill-will between the two of them, that was his relationship to Locus. He no doubt had a real name, a family, and a life story that concluded with him guarding an import/export warehouse at two in the morning local time. Locus knew none of that, though, nor would he ever learn it. All he knew was that the man was 5’11, heavyset, and 261.91 meters away. Tango-2 was armed with a fully automatic rifle, but that rifle was presently slung over his shoulder, and hadn’t been touched in hours. Through his scope, Locus could even see that the weapon was safetied.

“ _Copy_ ,” he muttered back into his mic, twitching a muscle in his cheek to adjust the graphics on his HUD. A computer that would go for a couple hundred K on the black market effortlessly analyzed the elevation, humidity, temperature, and wind speed, and the holographic dot of Locus’ targeting reticle shifting almost microscopically with the calibrations. Locus glanced at the numbers and re-checked them in his head, coming to the same results. The art of marksmanship was dying in the age of computer-assisted aiming, but Locus was old school that way. He’d learned the hard way about the perils of over-relying on your tech. “Do you have eyes on Tango-1?”

“ _Yes_.” A little blue dot blinked into existence on his HUD, a color-swapped version of his own dot. Getting their equipment to talk to one another had been a Herculean endeavor - literally hundreds of compatibility issues to troubleshoot - but the payoff was more than worth it. “ _East side’s clear. On my mark?_ ”

“South side is clear.” Locus _should_ have had a spotter operating alongside him to independently confirm that, but he’d worked without one for so long that he was used to wearing both spotter and sniper hats at once. “On your mark.”

“ _Three...two...one… **mark**._”

Locus exhaled slightly, squeezing the trigger as he did. The rifle, suppressed though it was, shuddered momentarily as the sub-sonic shot was squeezed off. He peered back through his scope-

“ _-both hostiles down_ ,” the voice in his earpiece confirmed, a split-second before he made the same assessment.

“Copy. No activity on my side.” Only two newly-made corpses, blood and brain oozing out onto the rain-slicked pavement. Locus zoomed his scope out further still. A couple of humanoid thermal signatures he’d previously identified continued aimlessly milling about, feeling unthreatened and looking unthreatening. None of the radio frequencies he’d been monitoring showed any sudden spikes in activity, no emergency lights were kicked on.

Two clean kills, in the technical if not literal use of the word. The men had never stood a chance, never even known that their lives were in danger. Locus didn’t trust himself to judge whether that was a mercy or not.

His comm line clicked open a half-minute later. “ _No movement. I’m going in._ ”

Locus tensed by degrees. “Acknowledged, Agent Carolina.”

* * *

Against every instinct in her body, Carolina slowly crept her way towards the loading bay in the back of the building.

When the tactical question boiled down to ‘ _stealthiness versus speed_ ’, Agent Carolina had pretty much always gone with the latter. In her mind, the options were two sides of the same coin. What you were trying to avoid was your adversary being able to effectively counter your intrusion. Whether you accomplished that by being too stealthy to notice or too speedy to react to were two means to the same end. The faster you moved, the less time you had to be spotted, and the less it mattered whether you _were_.

Her partner on overwatch had come with a different philosophy of battle. One she was doing her damndest to - if not _adjust_ to - then at least meet somewhere roughly around the middle.

Carolina told herself that it was a concession to the mission parameters as much as anything. There were an unknown number of civilians in the battlespace, civilians whose lives would likely be jeopardized should a gunfight erupt. No matter how good and how fast _she_ was, Carolina’s ‘speed over stealth’ playbook did a less-than-optimal job of safeguarding third parties. Which was why they were doing things _his_ way. Kinda.

She had to admit, he was _good_. Not an improvisational genius like her fellow Freelancers had been, but the hyper-competent professionalism that befitted that old ‘ _perfect soldier_ ’ persona. They’d spent two days just on reconnaissance, surveilling the complex of warehouses on the waterfront from every conceivable angle, even digging up old construction permits and utilities records from the municipal database. Working in shifts, they’d undertaken a pattern-of-life analysis that was more thorough than anything Carolina had ever seen with Project Freelancer. They’d recorded the arrival and departure of vehicles, the changing of shifts, the radio habits and protocols of the dozen-plus security personnel. Which doors required a key fob, which rooms kept the lights on after dark, which ships made a habit of passing the quay, and when. It was, in a word, _methodical_.

Carolina didn’t remember half of it, but it nevertheless filtered into her situational awareness, on a subconscious level if nothing else. If anything _changed_ , she’d feel it in her bones.

She retrieved a key fob embedded with an RFID chip from the cooling corpse of Tango-2, doing her best to throw up psychological firewalls as she did. Like any ex-Freelancer she was no stranger to dead bodies, but even the suppressed bullets had wrecked unusually blood carnage on their targets. And even Freelancers tried to avoid touching brain matter.

Carolina tapped the fob against her armor, which instantly read and cloned the electromagnetic signature, transmitting a copy to Locus for good measure. She could have just as easily blown her way into the building with a shaped explosive charge, or even a well-placed kick, but the word of the day was _frictionless_.

The electronic lock blinked green and chirped welcomingly as she approached it.

“ _Lost visual_ ,” Locus reported, as Carolina slipped inside the warehouse. That was part of the plan. Based on their early reconnaissance, they’d determined that the majority of the complex’s security staff were located in several of the adjacent buildings, all of which could be easily targeted by Locus from his perch. Despite the camouflage enhancements to his armor, he’d conceded to Carolina’s demand to take the _Assault_ component of the mission.

There was one guard around the first corner Carolina rounded, bludgeoned into unconsciousness before he had a chance to react. Her visor automatically cross-referenced the guard’s face against the rogue’s gallery of visages they’d collected during their surveillance. Carolina frowned when the search returned no matches. It was hardly unimaginable that they hadn’t managed to get a headshot of every comer and goer, but still…

...something had _changed_. And the hairs on the back of her neck began rising.

* * *

“Unidentified vehicle approaching from Private Lane 6-A,” Locus growled, swivelling his rifle on its tripod. “Civilian box truck, looks like a rental.”

Carolina was transmitting a live stream of her helmet’s video feed, which was piped into his HUD picture-in-picture style. In the corner of his eye, Locus watched as Carolina halted her advancement, crouching lower to the floor as she did. “ _Trouble_?”

The vehicle stopped for a few seconds, idling for whatever reason. Locus took the opportunity to zoom in on the chassis, the laser rangefinder on his rifle’s scope making millimeter-accurate measurements of the relative heights of the cargo box and the tires.

“There are at least several hundred kilos in the cargo box,” Locus replied, zooming out as the truck began moving again. That was bad. Less weight and he’d have assumed it was empty. _More_ weight and he would’ve assumed it was genuine cargo. That sweet spot raised all the wrong flags. “They’re going to see the dead Tangos in less than a minute.”

The line was quiet for several seconds.

“ _Plan B_?”

A sigh escaped him. He _hated_ Plan Bs.

Locus’ second shot of the night was, by any metric, much tougher than the first one. He was trying to shoot a moving target, of varying speed, at a sharp angle, with little prep time, through a layer of tinted glass. And the wind had picked up.

He made it anyways, of course.

His shot hit the driver right through the trachea, piercing through the windshield as it did. The van didn’t stop, though, the dead man’s foot pushing down on the accelerator. The automatic braking system _should_ have kicked in, but as was the case with most vehicles in the Outer Colonies, that feature had been disabled on the truck. Because that feature _could theoretically_ be used by the UNSC to shut down any vehicles, should they so choose to, and independence-minded settlers would rather rewrite their vehicles’ firmware than be exposed to the risk of overrides.

So for reasons that would take an undergraduate political science course to explain in their entirety, the van smashed into one of the warehouse’s walls at a little over sixty kilometers an hour.

Locus mentally shifted his focus to his earpiece. His rangefinder was currently bouncing an invisible laser off of one of the truck’s still-intact windows. The laser could detect the slight vibrations in the glass-panelled window, monitoring the pressure waves all noises produced. Those vibrations were then algorithmically translated _back_ into the audio waves that had produced said vibrations, which were then piped into Locus’ ear canal.

“- _ucking shit he’s been_ shot _man. Get down someone’s fucking_ shooting _us!”_

The back of the cargo box flew up and open, and a handful of men began staggering their way out of it.

“ _So much for_ ‘making it look like an accident’,” Carolina bemoaned in his earpiece.

Locus cleared his throat. “...Plan C?”

* * *

There had only been one thing in the universe that had rivalled Agent Carolina back when she was with Project Freelancer. And in a warehouse filled with two-bit petty criminals and half-wit wannabe thugs?

No one stood goddam chance.

She wasn’t as fast as she had been at her absolute prime, with the full resources of Project Freelancer at her disposal and nothing but her leaderboard ranking on her mind. But that was much like saying a 14.5mm APFSDS round wasn’t travelling _quite_ as fast as its top speed by the time it hit you. At the end of the day, the degrees of difference didn’t matter a whole fucking lot.

Carolina pushed deeper into the warehouse like a teal-colored typhoon. Stealth had been abandoned in the name of speed, and some subconscious part of her was entirely happy with that. Not the _conscious_ part of her mind - that part was much too busy conducting the homicidal equivalent of triage - but she was back in her element.

And what a sanguine element that was.

“ _I’m dropping to ground level, covering south entrance_ ,” Locus radioed to her, and in the corner of her HUD she saw him fast-roping his way to the pavement. “ _You’re moving too fast, I can’t get a fix on your position._ ”

Carolina gritted her teeth, weaving between rows of shipping containers as an orchestra of ricocheting rounds filled the air around her. “That’s kind of… the _point_ ,” the growled back, clambering her way up two stacked twenty-foot equivalent units to reach a second-floor catwalk. She sprinted down the length of the gangway in Olympics-worthy time, literally smashing her way into the temporary office space that had been constructed at the end of it. “At least ten more hostiles inside than we planned for.”

“ _And at least twenty more outside. One moment_.” The radio link went silent, and then a single high-powered shot - audible even over the sporadic gunfire - echoed throughout the warehouse. A fraction of a second later, they were plunged into darkness. “ _Main building power offline. There’s no UPS, so that should buy us some time.”_

A man stumbled blindly into the office space Carolina was occupying, incapacitated by a roundhouse kick he could never have seen coming. 

“Yeah,” Carolina breathed back. “Fingers crossed.”

* * *

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> First off, a quick note on attribution: the first definition for “tango” that I used in the summary comes from the [Oxford English Dictionary](https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/tango). The second definition comes from [Wiktionary](https://en.wiktionary.org/w/index.php?title=tango). The fancy phonetics come courtesy of [the Cambridge University Press](https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/tango). And yes, I went with “[dictionary definition for a summary](http://fansplaining.com/post/138677180613/types-of-fanfic-summaries-and-what-they-mean)” yet again.
> 
> So I did indeed get the inspiration for this work immediately after reading _[Park Place: Or, How Red Team Nearly Ceased To Be](https://archiveofourown.org/works/16476269)_. They’re not really the same kind of story in terms of tone or genre, but damned if _PPoHRTNC2B_ didn’t remind me of how much fun one can have with Locus and Carolina.
> 
> I have one or two more updates to this already written (basically because I decided to use chapters in lieu of proper scene transitions). Your readership and feedback does indeed mean the world to me. Please feel free to leave any comments, thoughts, or headcanons in the comments. Criticism is the only way I’ll ever get better as a writer. If you’d like to know more about me/my writing, feel free to hit up my [About](http://www.pvoberstein.tumblr.com/about) page. I’m also active on both [reddit](https://www.reddit.com/user/pvoberstein/overview) and [Tumblr](http://www.pvoberstein.tumblr.com/), and can be reached through any of the means on my [Contact](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Liara_90/profile) page.


	2. Chapter 2

* * *

Locus’ shot hadn’t taken out _all_ the lights in the warehouse. Just about every guard carried a military surplus flashlight, and five or six of them combined could provide pretty decent illumination. There were several lighting systems which also ran on their own stand-alone battery power, as well as an emergency lighting system that provided illumination around all the entrances and exits.

It was the latter that was providing most of their light right now. Locus and Carolina had fought their way to the warehouse’s subterranean levels, which were bathed in a gloomy red glow. The underground levels were a seemingly bottomless cavern of container storage, where automated stacking and retrieval systems were constantly adding and removing containers in the logistical equivalent of Jenga. Insofar as Locus and Carolina had been able to determine, this particular aspect of the operation was almost entirely legitimate, servicing a mix of interplanetary transportation conglomerates and dozens of local shipping businesses. It wasn’t a particularly _profitable_ enterprise, but it didn’t need to be.

It just needed make the _actually illegal_ part of the operation functionally invisible.

“With the computers offline, we don’t be able to query the target’s location,” Locus stated, as he approached the guardrail of a catwalk overlooking the containerized sprawl below. The warehouse’s subterranean surface area was almost triple its above-ground footprint, and it was utterly featureless. Just row after row of stacked container units, infrequently punctuated by an offline retrieval robot.

“Maybe you should have thought of that _before_ you shot the power off,” Carolina grumbled back. Her motion sensors were coming up blank, but that didn’t mean much. There were so many refrigerated and heat-insulated units that it would be child’s play to hide from infrared sensors, and any one of containers could conceal a dozen gunmen.

“ _That_ was a tactical necessity,” bit back Locus. “So were the other shots…”

Carolina unclipped her grappling gun, firing the prongs around the guardrail. She said nothing to Locus, who seemed to be radiating a newfound disquiet. She had only the faintest understanding of what was happening inside Locus’ mind, and no real desire to perform a psychological excavation. And the absolute _last_ thing she needed was her ~~partner~~ backup having a morality crisis in the middle of a mission.

Carolina cleared her throat. “Speaking of tactical, what’s the situation up top?”

Locus stood still for several seconds, doing his best to piece together the puzzle from the radio signals his suit was intercepting. He didn’t have the codes or the computational power to decrypt half the signals it was receiving, but even the metadata was useful. “Local authorities are setting up a perimeter, but none are advancing yet.” That was in harmony with their preliminary intelligence assessment, namely that whoever was running this warehouse had most of the municipal services in their pocket. “There’s also a no-fly zone in effect, so there are no private UAVs overhead.”

“So the cops are either paid off or waiting for us to finish killing each other,” Carolina grumbled, before throwing herself off the catwalk. The grappling line slowed her descent perfectly, and she landed light as a cat. “ _Groundside clear._ ”

“Copy. Descending.” Locus slung his rifle over his back and fast-roped down the grappling line, falling only slightly slower than Carolina had. He experienced a brief sensation of extreme vulnerability - a moment when he was _forced_ to trust that the ex-Freelancer not only had his back but had no intention of sticking a knife in it - before his feet hit the ground with a dull _thud_.

Carolina didn’t acknowledge his landing, her eyes focused on the maze of containers ahead of them. “This is going to be like finding a needle in a haystack,” she muttered, as the two of them began advancing into the belly of the beast, their visors scanning every container they passed.

“We can make educated guesses,” Locus replied. He couldn’t see it behind her visor, but Carolina had raised an eyebrow. “We’re looking for a container that arrived within the last three weeks. Given that this warehouse looks like it’s under-capacity, there’s a chance that it’ll be in a cluster with other containers that arrived around that same time.”

Carolina cocked her head. “It’s better than… nothing,” she eventually answered. She stood still for several seconds, tinkering with her HUD settings. “Okay. My visor’s configured to scan shipping codes. Anything that reads as arriving around April 1 will be color-coded _green_. Shipping units in physical proximity that have _not_ been scanned will be color-coded _yellow_.”

It was times like these that she really missed Epsilon. Well, that wasn’t strictly true. She missed him all the time. But this was when his A.I. routines could have been a massive assist. Carolina’s searching system - while more refined that simply running down aisle after aisle looking for a matching serial number - was almost unfathomably crude compared to the optimized search algorithms Epsilon could’ve run in his sleep.

Not that he had slept, of course.

An explosion behind them aborted Carolina’s pang of loss.

“We’ve got trouble,” Locus growled, as hostiles began showing up on their motion trackers like it had a measles infection.

“Good thing we brought some of our own,” Carolina replied, readying her rifle.

Locus shook his head. “Find the container. I’ll buy us time.” He paused, sensing Carolina’s hesitation. “You’re faster.”

That assuaged Carolina’s ego and her nerves enough for her to agree. “Copy that,” she replied, doing a quick inventory of her remaining ammo reserves. “There’s not a lot of cover here, try not to get pinned down.”

“That won’t be a problem, Agent Carolina.”

By the time she glanced back, Locus had already vanished.

* * *

She was looking for a container, in the middle of a gunfight, pursued by angry men, and having no real idea of what was _in_ said container.

And she had the weirdest feeling of déjà vu for some reason.

“-481, -636, -317…” Carolina muttered the last three digits of every serial number under her breath, every single one of them a negative. Even _she_ could only move so fast, though, and there was just too much ground to cover. “-999, -117, -401…”

The sounds of gunshots echoed in the cavernous, subterranean warehouse. Given how many of these containers seemed to be transporting potentially explosive components, Carolina wasn’t exactly comforted by her attackers’ inaccuracy.

“ _They’re pushing forward_ ,” Locus informed her over the radio link, a hint of aggravation creeping into his tone. “ _Falling back about one hundred meters.”_

“Copy,” replied Carolina, leaping from one row of containers to another to scan another cluster of recently-arrived boxes. “How’s our exfil looking?”

“ _Compromised. They’re pushing forward from the emergency access stairwell at the southwest, too.”_

That was strange. She hadn’t exactly been carving notches into her belt, but between her and Locus they must have killed or seriously injured no fewer than twenty grunts already. The men guarding the warehouse weren’t soldiers, either, most of them were being paid slightly more than minimum wage for what was basically a 9-to-5. And you didn’t risk your life to safeguard some stranger’s property at _those_ rates.

_...-111, -416, -905…_

“ _Ahh!”_

“Locus?”

The line was silent for several seconds. “ _Lucky shot. Armor absorbed most of the impact.”_

“Try not to use all our luck up,” Carolina replied, her visor sweeping over a half-dozen other containers, before she continued her sprint. “I’m going to need it to find this fucking-”

9732-431-2079-391

“-thing.”

“ _Agent Carolina_?”

“Found it. -391, a Maersk Intersystems Intermodal Container. Give me a minute to open it up.”

A bullet whizzed through the air around her. It was a wildly stray shot, fired by someone who no doubt had no idea she was even there, but it was still too damn close for comfort.

“One _minute, Agent Carolina.”_

“Right.”

Carolina took a small step back. The container was ground-level, which simplified a part of her problem. _A_ part of the problem. The only way to properly access the container was from the front or back, both of which were obstructed by near-identical stacks of containers. Which meant she’d have to go through the _sides_ of it. The metal was too thick for any of her suit’s sensors to scan through, and nothing on the EM spectrum was emanating from it. She didn’t want to risk an explosive charge, given how volatile the container’s contents could be, which meant she’d have to go with the plasma cutter.

Another bullet skipped off the ground a dozen-odd feet away from her.

The plasma torch mounted onto Carolina’s gauntlet wasn’t _quite_ Freelancer-grade tech, but it was the best you could get from commercial-off-the-shelf procurement. An accelerated jet of hot plasma began carving through the steel hull of the shipping container, slicing an ovaline hole in the box. When the cuts were complete, Carolina fired her grappling gun right into the middle of the carved-out portion of the container, pulling it towards her with a powerful _yank_. The steel chunk was pulled out like the top of a pumpkin before Halloween.

“I’m in,” announced Carolina, peering her head inside the shipping container. The box looked like it been filled hastily, _sloppily_. There were several palettes of foodstuffs, what looked like crates of pharmaceutical products, heating insulation boards, scattered MREs... 

“ _And?_ ” Locus asked.

“Regroup on my position, our extraction just got complicated,” Carolina replied. She belatedly thought to tap on her helmet’s mounted flashlight, projecting real light into the container, instead of just infrared rays you needed night-vision gear to see with.

At the far end of the container, a young woman flinched at the sudden brightness.

“ _Very_ complicated.”

* * *

“Can you walk?” asked Locus, crouching down in front of the woman. Carolina had found some battery-powered flashlights within the container, which offered them at least minimal illumination. The woman didn’t respond to Locus. “ _Mi nombre es…_ ¿ _Puedes caminar?_ ” He asked again, trying a different track with an equally-slim chance of success.

More silence. “Do you really think _you’re_ the best one to be talking to her?” Carolina asked, a little darkly, as she peaked her head out of the container. Locus had taken a wide arc to her position, dropping a timed explosive charge far away from their current location within the warehouse. With any luck, his decoy would buy them a couple of minutes.

Locus scowled behind his mask. “And you _would_ be, Agent Carolina?” he responded, derisively. She had no real reply to that.

Locus returned his attention to the woman. She looked to be about sixteen, though Locus admitted to himself that he could have been off by a few years in either direction. She was wearing a pale blue outfit that vaguely resembled medical scrubs, and patches of her hair looked like they’d been shaved recently. Patches right around where you’d make incisions for brain surgery, Locus couldn’t help but observe.

“We’re here to rescue you.” That was technically true, even if neither he nor Agent Carolina had known about the woman’s existence a few minutes ago. “Can you move?”

“Locus, this-”

“ _Yes_.”

Both soldiers startled a little as the woman spoke for the first time. “Yes, I can walk,” she repeated, staggering upright. Her voice sounded raspy, like she was fighting off a bad cold, and she moved like she had one, too.

“Good,” said Carolina, crossing back over to the woman’s side of the container. Locus wordlessly took his cue to watch the incision in the box. “We’re going to try to get you out of here.”

“Thank you,” the woman whispered. And she dropped back to the floor, her knees impacting with a harsh _thud_.

“Shit.” Carolina crouched down, trying to help the woman back up. What she would have given for York’s old Healing Unit right about now. “Locus, I’m going to carry her. Can you draw them north-east-”

“-is that an Optican autoinjector?”

Carolina blinked, belatedly realizing that the woman was pointing to a slim cylinder tucked into her armor, near her thigh. “Yes,” she answered, detaching it from her armor and holding it out for examination. “It’s loaded with a pseudo-adrenal-”

And before Carolina could finish her sentence, the injector had been snatched right out of her hand and jabbed into the young woman’s thigh.

“ _That’s a_ very _high dosage for her weight_ ,” Locus said over the comlink, speaking quietly so as to be heard only over Carolina’s earpiece.

“Oooooh,” the woman let out a low groan as the military-grade stimulant made its way through her circulatory system. “I feel fine.” She proved her point by springing to her feet, almost twitching with nervous energy.

“Great,” Carolina said, trying to conceal her wariness. For starters, Carolina knew the woman was going to crash as soon as she finished metabolizing the stim, which would probably be in no more than an hour.

Carolina also wondered just how the _hell_ she’d been fast enough to snatch something out of a Freelancer’s hand to begin with.

“Locus, I’ll take point, draw them as far away as possible. Take the p-” she almost said _package_ “- _protectee_ to the cargo elevator.”

“Power’s still offline,” Locus reminded her, rather unnecessarily.

“But the ladder isn’t,” Carolina shot back. “ _Go_. If they find us while we’re in here-”

“- _Hey, hey everyone, it looks like part of this container was cut open_!” A voice called out from a few feet away.

Locus leaned out and shot the speaker through his mouth.

“I’ll run fast,” Carolina concluded.

* * *

Somewhere between all the gunfire and the explosions, it crossed Locus’ mind that he’d had this kind of partner before.

Felix had been, he had to begrudgingly admit, a homicidal prodigy. You could tout the importance of training, self-discipline and determination until you were blue in the face, but there _was_ such a thing as natural talent, and Felix had had it in spades. His marksmanship scores had always been grossly out-of-proportion to the amount of time he actually spent practicing on the range, dating back all the way to his days at Parris Island. His reflexes and hand-eye coordination had both been in some absurdly high-nineties percentile. He could ace exams having barely skimmed the material, could familiarize himself with a new gun or gadget in a fraction of the usual time.

That had led to no small amount of arrogance, something that had come across in his fighting style. Felix, for better or for worse, had always had faith in his ability to just plain _improvise_. He’d had little of Locus’ patience and even less of his respect for doctrine. There was simply no situation he couldn’t talk, walk, or shoot his way out of.

And there was just a bit of that in Agent Carolina.

“ _Going high_ ,” she yelled, as she half-climbed, half-kicked her way up a stack of containers, using one of the disabled stack retrieval robots as a brace. She continued to jump back and forth between the rows of containers, sometimes dropping down several levels, popping in one side of a container and bursting out the other. It was three-dimensional combat in a way that no soldier in the galaxy had ever trained for, _could_ ever train for. It was improvised, it was chaotic, and it _worked_.

And once again, Locus found himself trying to be the voice of grounded reason. He was having pretty much the same amount of success this time around, too.

“Don’t let them draw you too far away,” he reminded Carolina, as he watched her shrink smaller and smaller in his vision. A fragmentation grenade had exploded a stack of containers in front of him, and he would have to waste precious time scrambling through the wreckage.

“ _It’s faster if I hunt them down…”_ Carolina replied, through heavy breaths. “ _...rather than… wait for them to find us.”_ Her helmet cam feed had become even more useless, as to Locus’ eye it just looked like a blurred streak of emergency red lighting.

Locus did his best to assist their VIP through the collapsed shells of cargo containers (and whatever had once been inside them). “I need you close, Agent Carolina. We don’t have much cover and I need your suppressive fire.”

“ _Don’t tell me… you miss me?_ ” Carolina replied, and Locus could practically hear her smiling. It was the sound of someone who enjoyed what they did.

Locus zoomed the optics of his visor, frowning inside his helmet as he did. The cargo elevator he’d been hoping to use as his escape route looked like a mangled mess, with thick black smoke billowing out of it. He had no idea who or what had caused that, but there was no way he’d be able to escort a civilian up the elevator shaft with that much smoke.

“Agent Carolina, the elevator’s been compromised. Can you see if any of the other exits are clear?”

There was a long silence on the channel.

“ _See the container I just pinged?”_ Carolina asked, as a holographic cube flashed on his HUD. “According to the HAZMAT label, that’s full of neo-PETN, for the lunar mining ops.”

From his position crouched behind the tumbled mess of shipping containers, Locus felt his skin go clammy. “We’re in a subterranean chamber directly under the Baptizo Channel,” he reminded her, or possibly himself.

“ _Beneath the_ dock _, which is much shallower_. _And these suits are buoyant. Or mine is, at least,_ ” Carolina replied.

Locus made out the sounds of two men approaching his position. He peaked out just long enough to squeeze off a pair of terminal shots, ducking back before any of his would-be attackers could fire back. “That’s…”

“... _crazy?_ ” Carolina ventured.

Locus scowled. “I wasn’t going to say that.” He paused. “It’s _risky_.”

“ _Do_ _you have a_ better _solution?_ ” Off in the distance, what looked and sounded like another fragmentation grenade transformed more containers into wreckage. “ _I’ll take your silence as a_ ‘no’.”

“Copy, Agent Carolina.” He returned his attention to the young woman beside him. To her credit, she seemed handling the situation shockingly well, looking alert but not panicked. He didn’t have time to wonder just what that meant right now. “Ma’am, my partner is going to detonate some explosives at the far end of this floor.” The word ‘ _partner_ ’ was probably the wrong one, but Locus didn’t have time to think of a more appropriate substitute right now. “This will probably cause the ceiling to collapse.”

A lifetime ago Locus had been trained in the esoteric art of underwater demolition, a rather niche martial skill he hadn’t exactly had much use for as a quote-unquote space pirate. But he remembered what exactly a well-placed explosion could do. “I suggest you hold on to me.”

He’d intended that as an earnest piece of advice - his armor had an integrated buoyancy compensator that could keep them from drowning - but something about her reaction suggested she’d interpreted it as a warning. Or worse. “Please.”

“ _Charges planted_.”

The woman rested a hand gently on his pauldron. “Don’t see how I have much of a choice.”

“Thank you,” Locus replied. “ _Agent Carolina, we’re set._ ”

“ _Great. Five seconds.”_

Locus shouldered his rifle. “Open your mouth and cover your ear-”

The woman was already doing so. So she knew what to do when confronted with a shock wave. Curi-

The bright flash of the exploding neo-PETN hit Locus a fraction of a second before the shock wave did. He barely managed to stay on his feet as the concussive force radiated outwards in every direction, tossing shipping containers into the air like lawn chairs in a tornado.

The initial shock wave was followed by the thunderous noise of water flooding in from the ceiling. Locus had never experienced being in a subterranean structure being flooded, and there was something gut-clenchingly _unsettling_ about realizing that the water was coming from _above_ you. It spoke to deep-rooted fears that maybe human mastery over the elements wasn’t all it was cracked up to be.

Carolina skidded to a halt in front of them, her grappling gun already in her hand. “Well that ought to keep the local authorities busy.” A bit more of the ceiling collapsed, accelerating the biblical deluge of the warehouse. Carolina took aim with her grappling gun and fired three prongs directly into the ceiling above them. Being on the opposite end of the complex, _that_ part of the ceiling was actually underneath dry land, so she hoped it would be a stable anchor.

Hoped.

“A'rynasea, get to my position, quickly,” Locus instructed, opening the radio link directly to his spaceship.

“Can the Locus Pocus operate underwater?” Carolina asked, as the murky grey-blue water of the docks finally began pooling at their far end of the warehouse.

“In theory, though I’ve never had the need to test that,” Locus answered. The VIP pressed a little closer against his armor as the floodwater reached her feet. “And I would prefer you not call it that.”

Beneath her helmet, Locus knew she was smiling. He wordlessly cursed the Reds and their corrupting influences.

The cracks along the ceiling continued to spread, as the structural integrity of the complex began failing catastrophically. Carolina clutched the grip of her grappling gun with one hand and offered the other to Locus. “Take my hand,” she instructed, as the warehouse’s emergency lighting shorted out.

At the far end of the warehouse, Locus could see a torrent of water racing towards them. It really was like something out of a movie, an elemental force barreling down upon them, drowning everything in its path. Locus crouched down, allowing the VIP to clamber onto his back, like a very fucked-up piggyback. And then he took Carolina’s hand in his own.

“My name’s June, by the way,” the VIP said, her mouth a half-inch from his ear. “Short for June-”

The ceiling collapsed inwards, deafening Locus to her words.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh hey, look, I managed to update something. As I said, this is going to be a slow process. Forgive me while I learn how chapters work. And +100 Internet points to any smart cookies who can induce the end of June’s sentence.
> 
> (Why can’t I be one of those cool and aloof authors who doesn’t need to write disjointed chapter notes?)


	3. Chapter 3

* * *

A'rynasea had been a cozy home even when it had been just Locus and his many guns living there. Adding one passenger had cramped things considerably. _Two_ passengers and it was approaching positively claustrophobic levels of crowdedness.

“How is she?” Carolina asked, as Locus made his way back to the cockpit, a little more than ten feet from where June was presently dozing. As they had predicted, the chemical stimulants June had used during their escape had utterly forsaken her, and she’d all but collapsed upon their safe return to A’rynasea.

Locus made a vague shrug. “She seems healthy, though I hesitate to say _normal_ ,” he began, once the cockpit door had sealed shut behind him. “A few cuts and bruises from the escape. I put her on an intravenous drip of nutrients and multivitamins; with any luck she’ll wake up at full strength.”

Carolina nodded. Like Locus, she’d stripped out of her armor right after they broke atmo, and had proceed to collapse into the co-pilot’s chair. Her bare feet, poking out of the ends of two-sizes-too-large sweatpants, rested on the control console. “And everything… _else_?”

Another noncommittal shrug. “She has surgical scars along her cranium, which are still healing, and several others along her torso. I don’t have the medical equipment to figure out what those surgeries were _for_ , though.” That wasn’t surprising. Both she and Locus were more than competent field medics, but neither had exactly gone to med school. “I set a course for the Hawking system. Once we’re sure we haven’t been tracked, we can figure out where we’re going next.”

“We know where we’re going next,” Carolina replied, in a tone suggesting that there wasn’t a whole lot of room for argument.

There was no reply from Locus. Carolina ignored the silence for several seconds, chalking it up to his usual laconic self. But then the silence grew too heavy to ignore. She couldn’t help but glance sideways, trying to read what was happening in that head of his.

“I’m not sure that it’s a good idea to return to Chorus. Not immediate-”

Carolina cut him off with an angry wave of her hand. “You can stay on the ship, I’m not going to drag you to see-”

Locus took a half-step forward, and Carolina squirmed herself upright in response. The hairs on the back of her neck suddenly stood on end as the choice between _fight_ or _flight_ began creeping its way up her nervous system, a deep-seated _discomfort_ at his presence. Her muscles tensed unconsciously at his approach, arms uncrossing, a foot sliding along the dashboard console as if seeking purchase... 

“I am not concerned about seeing Agent Washington,” Locus stated, his voice a low rumble. And then his expression softened by degrees, the features of his face slackening slightly. “Or rather… I am concerned about what we might bring _to_ him.”

Carolina’s face darkened. “Care to explain?”

Locus looked hesitant for several seconds, glancing over his shoulder, to the other end of the ship. “The woman we rescued. Did you hear her name?”

Carolina shook her head. “I heard her say June, short for something.” She brushed wayward red hairs out of her eyes. “Did you search her full name?”

“No. Without knowing who she is, I wouldn’t risk drawing attention to ourselves through a traceable query.” Locus scratched his brow, right where his scar met his hairline. It was a favorite tic of his, Carolina had noticed. “And besides, I only have her first name. Her _full_ first name.” A name recovered from his helmet’s recording of the mission, the audio isolated, enhanced, amplified.

Carolina threw her hands up in only-slightly-mock exasperation. “ _Junebug_? _Juniper_? I really don’t need the soap-opera reveal, Locus.”

“June, short for Juneau.”

Carolina blinked.

Locus remained silent for several seconds, allowing Carolina to compose her thoughts. “As in... the state capital of Alaska?”

Saying the name aloud brought unwelcome memories rushing to the forefront of her mind. Memories of _Agent_ Alaska, standing there right in front of her, in Temple’s fucked up trophy room. A corpse locked in place, _stuffed_ , a suit of armor seared into Carolina’s vision during those hellish days of torture.

Locus cleared his throat. “Project Freelancer wasn’t the only covert program the UNSC funded.”

“No fucking shit,” Carolina growled back. His deadpan tone made it difficult for her to tell whether he was being patronizing or just restating known information for the flow of conversation. In her mood, she uncharitably assumed the former. “You guys at Charon hear about any project like that? Another 50-person program?”

Locus shook his head. “I was going to ask you the same thing, Agent Carolina,” he replied. His admission caused Carolina to relax by degrees, tensed shoulder muscles slackening. “There was no… _recruitment stream_ for Freelancer? No parallel or sub-projects?”

Carolina rubbed her face with her hands. “Not when I was there. Didn’t find any records of anything like that when I was hunting him, either. If the Director had any more secrets…” She picked at the sleeve of her hoodie, stretching and releasing the fabric. “I can’t rule it out, though,” she finally admitted.

“For what it’s worth,” Locus took another half-step towards her, and this time Carolina didn’t tense up, “I don’t think it’s related to Freelancer. Not directly, at least. If neither you nor Charon knew anything about it…” He trailed off.

“So, what?” Carolina asked, picking off more imaginary pieces of lint. “She’s part of another off-the-books UNSC project?”

“It’s possible Project Freelancer wasn’t alone in using States-based nomenclature.”

Carolina bounced her head on the headrest of her seat. “Or is it just another weird name?”

Locus tucked his chin down, a motion that earned him an oblique glance from Carolina. “I checked the name’s popularity in my offline copy of _Encyclopædia Britannica_ ,” he said, earning him an eye roll from Carolina. “Less than 10 a year. Its popularity died out towards the end of the 21st century.”

Carolina’s foot gently kicked the console of A’rynasea. “Well… fuck.”

“Given our lack of information - and the high level of risk in the worst-case scenario - I am in favor of moving cautiously,” Locus said, his eyes drawn to Carolina’s bare feet, the nervous curling-uncurling of her toes. “We can try talking to her when she wakes up.”

Carolina nodded in vague agreement, rising out of her seat and stretching her arms overhead as she did. A yawn escaped her, despite the gravity of their situation. “ _Damnit_ … I do _not_ have the energy to deal with this right now,” she groaned, rubbing her face.

Locus barely avoided a sympathetic yawn of his own. “It’ll be about thirteen hours until we reach Hawking, so now would be a good time to get some rest, Agent Carolina.”

“Yeah, but June stole my bunk,” Carolina replied, a little wryly.

Locus blinked. A'rynasea had only one proper cot, towards the stern of the ship, which was walled off from the cockpit. He let Carolina take it whenever they traveled together, giving her a modicum of both comfort and privacy.

“I’ll grab some of the camp bedding and sleep in the passageway,” Locus said, turning to collect his possessions from the cockpit. “The chairs here recline to 180 degrees, and you can take either one of them.”

Carolina took a half-step towards Locus, stopping him before he exited the cockpit. “Let’s… give our guest some privacy,” she said, somewhat cautiously. “I think the last thing she needs is waking up with a scary stranger watching her.”

Locus said nothing for several seconds, but his body language conceded the point. “Alright. We’ll share the cockpit.”

There was an odd formalness to his tone, a stiffness to his movements as he proceeded to retrieve the blankets and pillows from their storage compartments. Carolina wasn’t sure whether that was caused by an old-fashioned sense of propriety or lingering trust issues vis-à-vis his former enemy. Probably a bit of both, she reckoned.

They divvied up the beddings, with Locus crashing in the pilot’s seat and Carolina a few feet to his right. Locus fiddled with the computer until the lights dimmed as low as they could go on A'rynasea. The hundreds of little indicator lights lit up the room like constellations of the night sky, a cosmos of LEDs.

Carolina reclined her chair until it was flat, rolling onto her side and tugging up the blankets as best she could. It was hardly comfortable, but God knew she’d slept through worse. Locus, she distantly noted, reclined his seat only by degrees, looking like he was trying to catch a bit of shut-eye on his morning commute rather than tucking in for the night.

“Do you mind if I leave a light on for reading, Agent Carolina?” Locus asked.

“Go right ahead,” Carolina replied, tugging down her hoodie just a little lower over her eyes. “What’re you reading?”

Locus didn’t answer her, and she didn’t care enough to sit up and peak. But she could hear the sound of pages being turned, honest-to-God _paperback_ , dead-tree pages, like they were in some old period drama. She distantly wondered if he was paranoid about falling asleep before she did. They’d never slept in the same compartment on their travels together, after all.

“I promise I won’t try to smother you in your sleep,” Carolina said, as the pull of sleep clawed at her.

Locus snorted through his nose - a brief, entirely unguarded and unplanned reaction, almost jarring in its authenticity. “Thank you, Agent Carolina,” he replied, as he schooled his features and returned to that maddeningly neutral tone of his. “Sleep well.”

“Yeah,” she muttered in agreement. “‘Night.”

Carolina drifted off to the sound of pages being turned.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Look at that, another chapter. It’s going to be a bit longer until the next one comes out, though future chapters will hopefully be moderately longer and more interesting. I’m still figuring out how pacing works, so please bear with me as this adventure jaggedly unfolds.


	4. Chorus Consult Calamity (Part I)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Carolina takes their new charge in for a check-up on Chorus.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So this is now technically a post-[ _Singularity_](https://rvb.fandom.com/wiki/Red_vs._Blue%3A_Singularity) fic. Which I really lucked out into being in total canon-compliance with.

* * *

One of the underappreciated perks of having a stealth spaceship, in Carolina’s humble opinion, was not having to deal with air traffic control. Actually, not having to deal with border control of any kind, really. No visas, no declaration forms, no luggage accidentally being sent to Alpha Centauri. All you had to do was find a quiet patch of land on the outskirts of Armonia-2 and park your ship on it.

“Try not to touch any of the plants,” advised Carolina as the trio disembarked A’rynasea, which had settled in a patch of swampy woodlands that was destinated to become a strip mall in under a decade. “Basically everything on this planet is poison ivy, I’m pretty sure.”

“Shouldn’t be too hard,” replied June, holding out her arms. Carolina had to grin. They’d rummaged around A’rynasea trying to find any sort of suitable clothing for June, and ended up having to make due with a pale blue hoodie Carolina had picked up God knew when and where. It was warm and comfortable enough, sure, but the sleeves went on a good foot and a half past June’s wrists, making her limbs look like wet noodles. She was wearing a borrowed pair of Carolina’s shorts, too, though the hem of the hoodie was so low that you couldn’t tell.

“Nice,” Carolina replied, appreciatively. She was having a tough time getting a read on June, but the girl seemed nice enough. One would never have guessed she’d been rescued from a cargo contained and then a gunfight and then a subterranean flood a little less than a solar day ago. “Locus, you ready?”

“Just about,” he called back. Locus was finishing up weighing down a tarp over A’rynasea, a tarp which was basically a patchwork quilt of low-fidelity optical camouflage netting. It didn’t make the ship _invisible_ \- the contours were still pretty obvious if you knew where to look - but it hid the ship well enough from any passing hikers or satellites.

The trek into Armonia-2 was uneventful, apart from the mosquitoes. The city itself was booming, having absorbed a massive influx of refugees following the Chorus Civil War and the destruction of the original Armonia, and was the nexus of the planet’s redevelopment. The skyline was dotted with cranes, the streets lined with prefabricated structures, and every intersection oozed with unplanned development. After having witnessed firsthand what Chorus had suffered during the war, Carolina felt surprisingly heartened by just how bursting with life the new capital was.

She flagged down a taxi, and confirmed that the driver took cash.

“General Doyle General Hospital,” Carolina instructed.

She had questions she wanted answers to.

* * *

The men - and they were all men - moved with a quiet purposefulness. They’d spent the past several hours doing something that _looked_ like wandering, milling around the streets and alleys and parks that ringed the hospital. Every so often one of them would leisurely eat a hotdog while seated on a nearby bench, or sip a cappuccino on the patio of a café. And every so often one of them would pass by the hospital itself, casting perhaps a single sideways glance at a door or a window or a guard, but with nothing more than a pedestrian’s disinterest. On another planet the men might’ve seemed a little heavily dressed for the weather - bulky jackets in the middle of this hemisphere’s summer - but Chorus was a planet where half the population had been wearing full body armor a year ago. And so nobody noticed anything unusual about the dispersed cloud of bored-looking men.

Unfortunately.

They moved in through the hospital’s loading dock, which was tucked discreetly in the rear of the building, the large lot empty but for a single box truck. A lone security guard named Bozhidar Kovachev - Boz, to his friends - was supervising the unloading of pallet after pallet of processed foodstuffs for the kitchens. Boz, still slightly hungover from a late night in a loud club, never noticed that the two men unloading the truck had suddenly ceased their argument about match-fixing in the Choral Grifball League.

The bullet caught him in the back of the head, causing him to crash face first onto the concrete floor of the loading dock. Boz actually survived the shot, due to a fluke of ballistics; the small-caliber round ricocheted off his skull’s parietal bone in a way that left most of his brain functions intact. And so he was able to watch, from ground-level, as his blood formed a puddle around his head, could hear the sounds of precise footsteps and murmured commands. This wasn’t a simple robbery, his still-functioning brain was able to tell, not with the purposefulness of their movements and the professionalism of their voices.

Boz felt himself being unceremoniously turned over, as one of the men riffled through his pockets, stripping him of his gun, his walkie-talkie, and his electronic key fob. An act of theft that was just a few final heartbeats away from grave robbery.

He heard two men exchange quiet murmurs, and then saw a shadowy figure looming over him, just as his vision began to blacken. Boz didn’t see the second shot coming, either.

* * *

The woman standing in front of June scared her far more than either Locus or Carolina did. And June had seen them _kill_ people.

Said woman was short, lean, pale-skinned, dark-haired, apparently a morning person, and wearing _way_ the fuck too much eyeshadow. She had several elongated scars on the right side of her face, which June distantly recognized as the result of shrapnel injuries, and a smile that might’ve once been ‘ _infectious_ ’ but had long since passed into ‘ _unsettling_ ’ territory. She was also wearing a white lab coat - patched at the elbows and trimmed with purple - and a nametag clipped to its front pocket that identified her as DR. EMILY GREY.

“And you’re _sure_ she’s a doctor?” June asked, turning to face Carolina. And then she winced as Dr. Grey wrenched her head back into place. The doctor was currently running a glowing sensor… _thing_ … over June’s skull, poking and prodding at all the places where that skull had evidently been carved into.

“Well I can tell without even cutting you open that someone was trying _new and interesting things_ in your brain,” Grey said, with unfeigned chipperness. June wasn’t sure if that statement had been in response to her question, though, or just Grey’s ongoing ramblings. “But we are going to need a _full battery_ of tests to figure out what exactly’s going on in there,” she continued, rapping June’s head with her knuckles.

“Ow.”

Carolina took a deep breath. How anyone worked with Grey day in and day out was beyond her. And she’d had some pretty fucking problematic coworkers over her career. “We just need to figure out what happened to her. And how old she is.”

Grey’s eyes seemed to widen at that. “Ooh, do we have a chronological conundrum on our hands? Do you remember your parents? Where you were born? Early formative memories? Kindergarten aptitude scores? Menarche? Favorite TV show? First words?”

June shook her head, scratching her arms as she did. She’d already been over this with Locus and Carolina back on A’rynasea, over a breakfast of microwaved MREs, which made it marginally easier to say again. “Not really,” she answered. “Bits and pieces. But I’m not even sure if those memories are even… even real.”

“ _And_ she has retrograde amnesia!” Grey squealed. “I am going to go ahead and reserve an MRI suite _just for us_ today!”

June and Carolina sighed in stereo.

Carolina caught June’s eye. Despite the absolute shitshow of the past couple of days of her life, the girl was holding herself together surprisingly well. She might have to deal with demons for the rest of her life, but she was putting on a damn brave face for someone whose whole world had been turned upside down. “Alright, well, I’m going to go track down Wash, then,” Carolina said, making a motion to excuse herself. “Make sure Doctor Grey doesn’t have him strapped down to a dissection table, or something.”

“Oh, silly, it isn’t Wednesday,” Grey replied back, scooping up a clipboard and furiously penciling in observations.

Carolina shook her head, showing herself out.

The door closed with _clack_. June returned her attention to Doctor Grey. “That sign over there is just a joke, right?” she asked.

Grey looked up from her clipboard. “Oh, that one.” She paused. “Of course!”

THIS CLINIC HAS GONE [ 1 ] [ 7 ] DAYS WITHOUT AN IMPALEMENT.

* * *

Wash had never worked so hard for a tenth of a kilometer.

It was Part 4 of Part God Himself Doesn’t Know How Many of the recovery regimen that Dr. Grey had cooked up for Wash during his stay at General Doyle General Hospital. He ran on a treadmill - the exact distances varied, but it was always enough to get his heart pounding - while a breath mask affixed to his face and an EEC cap to his skull recorded his heaving breaths and his overwhelming desire to quit. Or so Wash assumed. He didn’t actually know what exactly the doctors were supposed to be learning from the devices strapped and taped to his head. They probably had a good purpose, and it probably had been explained to him. And he’d probably just forgotten it.

Then again, this was Doctor Grey overseeing his recovery. It was even money that this program legally constituted Mad Science.

There was a spike of pain in his chest.

Wash grit his teeth and kept running, doing his best to concentrate on something - _anything_ -else. The sound of his breath in his ears, the feel of the treadmill beneath his feet, the low _whirr_ of the motor looping the mat into infinity. _Anything_ but the little lights on the dash telling him that he was still ( _still!_ ) at 2.9 kilometers.

He wrenched his eyes up, to the television mounted in front of him. _Football_ , he could run with that. New England Patriots at New York Mets. Wash felt a vague _rumble_ in the back of his head, like his limbic system was trying to discreetly point out that the temporal lobe might have gotten a wire crossed somewhere. Wash ignored it, like he usually did. He needed to concentrate on running, not cognitive snafus. Just _one tenth_ of a kilometer longer and he could call it quits, he told himself.

Wash watched the screen for a few seconds. The not-Pats team was trying some kind of a screen pass, except they dropped the ball, and then someone seemed to call for a review with instant replay, and the closed captioning informed Wash that they were cutting to commercial. For a fraction of a second - between the fading of the ESPÑ logo and the fifteen-second spot for pickup trucks - the screen was perfectly black, reflective.

In that fraction of a second, Wash saw the reflection of a certain scarred soldier behind him.

The treadmill registered 3.0 kilometers. Wash kept running.

* * *

For reasons that were difficult to explain in their entirety without a stint in medical school, the humble clavicle ended up being pretty much the go-to bone for getting the guesstimate of a human body’s age. The _medial clavicular epiphyseal cartilage_ \- the relatively squishy bit of tissue where the collarbone met the sternum - ossified relatively late in the process of human development. It wasn’t quite like counting rings in a tree, but with a couple of centuries of data and June’s genometric profile to calibrate against, it was statistically-significantly better than anybody’s best guess.

June’s chest was briefly dosed with 50 milliampere-seconds of radiation from an x-ray machine with 120kV of juice pumped into it, allowing for a computerized tomography scan of the aforementioned tissue to be generated. Once the ghastly images of June’s clavicle cartilage had been built, a radiology technician fed them into a statistical software package, which conducted a Kruskal–Wallis one-way analysis of variance to judge just how old that cartilage was. Both the medical imaging software and the medical imaging software technician agreed that the pictures showed that June was _Stage II_ , i.e.: the images showed an ossified center with a visible nonossified epiphyseal line in the medial clavicle. For someone biologically female, that put their age at 15.20±2.39 years.

A similar test was performed on June’s forearms, measuring the degree of epiphyseal fusion between her ulna and radial bones. This produced images suggesting June was 15.71±4.41 years old, which when combined (through more mathematical voodoo) with the earlier scans of her clavicle refined the her age to 15.96±1.30 years.

“So you’re saying I have a birthday in less than a month?” June finally asked, as Grey translated the statistical gobbly goop into a rambling tirade about how President Kimball was refusing Grey’s _extremely reasonable_ request for next-generation x-gray generators and instead financing some sort of public sewage system.

“Almost certainly not!” Grey cheerfully corrected. “Actually, for legal purposes, I’m supposed to assign you a Jan 1 birthday by default. It’s the most popular birthday on Chorus, officially!” She paused. “ _Buuuut_ since we’ve become such close friends, I’ll let you can pick pretty much any day you like. Mine’s July 7th, if you need any ideas.”

June smiled, fidgeting with the folds of her medical gown. “What day was yesterday?”

* * *

When Carolina entered the GDG gymnasium - mostly empty, at this midday hour - she immediately honed in on the site of Washington on a stationary exercise bike. That threw her for a brief moment, because she could count the number of times she’d seen Wash biking on one fist. But then her eyes scanned the room and it _clicked_ as she spotted Locus on the other side of the gym, running through some regimen of his own on a dip station. She and Locus both kept scattered pieces of exercise equipment around A’rynasea - dumbbells, kettle drums, jump ropes, a tension pull-up bar - but he seemed like the sort of man who’d actually make use of proper gym equipment.

Or was he just trying to prove that he didn’t have a _thing_ about being around Washington?

Tearing her eyes from the ex-merc, Carolina made her way over to Wash, sashaying her hips _just_ a bitas she walked. She couldn’t tell if Wash noticed, though, given the way he was slouching over the bike’s handlebars, the front of his shirt thoroughly soaked through with sweat. He was still wearing his breath mask, which gave his gasps for air a vaguely Vaderesque quality, but the determination in his eyes was something else.

Standing in front of the bike, Carolina planted a hand on either of the handlebars, leaning forward by degrees. Wash managed to pull his head up, bobbing his skull in a limp nod as his thighs continued pumping away at the pedals. “ _Hey Carolina_ …” he managed to wheeze out, his voice muffled slightly by the mask.

“Hey yourself,” she replied, glancing down at the bike’s dash to get a read on just how hard Wash had been working. Her eyebrows rose of their own accord. “Didn’t know it was leg day.”

“ _It’s not_...” Wash sounded like he was going to say more, but also that holding a conversation was going to require a major force of will. “ _Just giving the glutes… their usual workout.”_

“Uh-huh,” Carolina shot back, unconvinced. “And it wouldn’t have anything to do with impressing a certain space pirate, would it?”

Wash’s fingers curled just a little tighter around the handlebars. “ _Oh… Locus is here?_ ” he half-asked, half-panted. Carolina shook her head, causing Wash to bow his. He pulled it up a few seconds later. “ _You know you’re the… the only person I’m trying to impress._ ”

Carolina allowed a small smirk to escape. “And you just _know_ I have a thing for sweaty gym rats, don’t you?” she asked dryly.

Wash made a noise that was _probably_ a laugh, but sounded a lot more like someone had just punched him in the lung. Carolina let her fingers slide a half-inch down the handlebars, until they were brushing against Wash’s. He looked up, and seemed to bike just a little bit harder, as if he actually _could_ pedal closer to her. Carolina smiled, and planted a small, quick kiss, just above Wash’s mouthpiece.

Somehow, Wash heart managed to beat even faster. And then his eyes darted to Locus.

Locus, who seemed to have paused, frozen halfway through a dip, biceps bulging, his expression unreadable and his gaze frozen on the two of them.

Carolina stood upright, noticing the exchange of significant looks across the gym. She seemed momentarily nonplussed, but then Wash’s gaze returned to his dashboard, and Locus resumed his dips.

_“Job seems to have… gone well_...” Washington grunted, his cycles slowing to a slightly more sustainable pace.

Carolina gave a short nod. Wash’s feelings on their current arrangement were… _complex_ , to put it mildly. Their past history with Locus, their collective trust issues, the ever-present possibility of dying on the job, and what Carolina assumed was Wash’s resentment - however well-hidden - at being left out...

“Yeah, surprisingly,” she finally confirmed, not wanting to go into too much detail. “Picked up a hitchhiker as we were leaving. Actually, she’s with Grey right now.”

Wash knew that this wasn’t the time to press for details, and just nodded in acknowledgement. But his eyes still drifted back to Locus’ spot on the dip station.

“Play nice,” Carolina reminded Wash, wiping a few stray hairs out of her eyes. “I have to go check in with our new friend, make sure Grey hasn’t gone ahead and dissected her. Catch you at lunch?”

Wash said nothing, but bobbed his head in acknowledgement, his eyes following Carolina out of the gym.

A second later, he realized Locus’ were, too.

* * *

The men holstered their weapons as they made their way up the stairwell. No doubt they only had a few minutes at most before someone found the mess they’d made in the loading dock and raised the alarm, but for now they still had the element of surprise. And to Ezekial Hawke, that was worth more than ten men.

Their target was the building’s computer administration office, which would give them access to both every electronic health record in Chorus _and_ the CCTV feeds of the hospital’s ubiquitous security cameras. To say nothing of the emergency lockdown protocols. The plan was admittedly rather inelegant, but it had been thrown together hastily, practically on-the-fly, with only a few hours to prep. Nothing Hawke hadn’t done before, with less sleep and a worse crew, but it was still worlds away from the Platonic ideal of a tactical assault plan.

They reached the sixth floor of the building, which housed the internal server farm, Gastroenterology, Physiotherapy, a small gym, and the Purchasing & Supplies department. If the floor plans they’d ripped from the Planning, Property & Development office of the City of Armonia-2 - admittedly a big _if_ \- the server room was accessible from two entrances: a main entrance off the east hallway, and a service door that connected to the gymnasium. Hawke had been a little surprised to see the IT department lay adjacent to the gym - old stereotypes about jocks and nerds died hard - but one of his operatives had explained that the gym’s air conditioning piggy-backed off the cooling infrastructure of the servers.

That worked just fine for him.

Hawke’s team hit their first point of real friction a hundred feet down the hallway. A uniformed security guard had been chatting up a temp, but he straightened up as the squad approached. In his work with GDG Safety & Security Services he generally dealt with nothing more problematic than a rambunctious drunk, or occasionally a desperate junkie. But he’d fought in the Federal Army, and he could sense danger bearing down on him.

“Excuse me, gentlemen,” he said, carefully positioning himself in the middle of the corridor. The group of men slowed up, just a little too uniformly. “Do you have ID badges? They’re supposed to be displayed at all times in this wing.”

Hawke forced a cough. “Yes, right, who has them? Jiro, do you-”

Hawke moved too fast for the security guard to have had a chance, landing a punch that shattered the cartilage of the man’s nose in an instant. Hawke tackled him to the ground before he could recover, landing two more punches to the guard’s face and throat. The rest of his squad was already moving, pistols drawn, the paper-thin pretense of their civilian disguises abandoned.

“Everyone remain calm,” Hawke ordered, standing upright. Blood dripped from his fist, but he didn’t think to wipe it. “We’re not here to hurt you. But we will if you get in our way.”

A chime in his cochlear implant informed Hawke that someone had sounded an internal alarm. He didn’t waste time looking around for who had triggered it, and instead focused on his men. “You two, secure the back access. The rest of you, on me.”

Hawke drew his own pistol, and began leading his men on a jog around to the east hallway. Nobody got in their way.

* * *

Washington keeled over and died.

Or at least, that’s what he sincerely _wished_ would happen. Because the alternative to dying was _living_ , and right now life consisted of _pain_. Specifically, pain in his calves, quads, glutes, lats, traps, hamstrings and both tri- and bi-ceps. He also wanted to throw up, and then never move again. That sounded good.

_‘At least getting shot in the neck was over quickly.’_

He would have been perfectly content to decompose right there on the gym mat - where he had finally collapsed on the _down_ step of a burpee - except there was a physical trainer who’d brought in an eight-ish-year-old girl and was apparently trying to teach her how to walk again, and Wash still had just a thin enough slimmer of pride to want to not embarrass himself in front of her.

With a Herculean effort Washington pulled himself to his feet, clumsily groping at his face to remove the breath mask. The rubber seal detached itself from his cheeks with a satisfying _pop_ , and Wash gulped down a few greedy breaths of air that didn’t taste like the inside of a boot. He winced as he peeled the EEG cap off his head - a few sweat-soaked hairs invariably caught on _something_ \- then proceeded to limp his way to the changeroom with as much dignity as he could muster.

But he’d done it. He’d outlasted Locus.

_Granted_ that was probably only because the aforementioned eight-year old girl hadn’t stopped staring at Locus from practically the moment she’d arrived, and was quiet obviously terrified of him. The kid had good instincts, in Wash’s humble opinion. Locus - out of either sympathy or self-consciousness - had hastily wiped down the bench he’d been weightlifting on and made a beeline for the changeroom.

Wash had collapsed about ten seconds after the door had swung shut behind Locus. But it didn’t matter. He held is head high as he headed for the lockers.

He found his locker own easily enough. The first time he’d used the hospital’s gym he’d stashed his bag in a locker and then spent twenty-minutes trying to remember which one it was. It annoyed him that he couldn’t count on his brain to remember _third from the top left_ or _second from the bottom right_ anymore, but it was just one of the realities of living with brain damage, something he’d come to accept. At least _this time_ around he knew what was wrong with him, which made developing coping mechanisms a whole lot easier.

Case in point. Wash walked confidently to the middle of the row of lockers, crouching down to the lower tier. Someone, at some point in time, had flash-stenciled the UNSC logo onto the locker’s door. It might take Wash a minute to _find_ the old eagle, but at least he knew his stuff was behind it.

It sure beat peering through vents in the ever-dimming hope of recognizing his duffel bag within.

The combination lock, weirdly, never gave him any trouble. Wash couldn’t remember the actual _combination_ of the code to save his life, but so far his muscle memory had never failed him. He pulled out a ratty towel, a small toiletries bag, and a pair of bath shoes he’d become rather insistent about wearing ever since York had forwarded him an article about bacteria in public showers all the way back on _Mother of Invention_. As if he didn’t have enough stuff to worry about.

Like Locus already being in the showers.

The bar of soap fell from Washington’s hand as he rounded the corner to the showers, and found himself face-to-face with Locus. Or rather, face-to-suspiciously-well-toned-buttocks. Locus turned slowly to face Wash, the shower’s spray splashing off of his back, his expression as cryptic as it always was.

There was a pregnant pause, the room silent except for the sound of water rushing from a solitary showerhead. Locus crouched down and picked up the bar of soap, which _of course_ had managed to slide up right beside him. It was the same offensively green Irish Spring soap that had been bought for centuries by people too cheap to buy anything better, though the expression on Locus’ face suggested he’d just discovered an ancient alien artefact.

He stood up, drawing himself up to his full height. Which was, actually, pretty impressive. Close proximity confirmed that he was _not_ playing around with those dumbbells back there, no siree.

He slapped the bar of soap into Wash’s hand, and turned back to face the wall.

Wash picked a shower at a 90° angle to Locus’, carefully setting his possessions down beside it. The water was warm, the pressure was strong, and there wasn’t any visible mould in the caulk. The only gripe Wash had was the complete absence of any sort of privacy partitions. Because it was only, like, the 26th century, right? It’d be _crazy_ to expect a state-of-the-art hospital to have that sort of Space Age technology. Because who _wouldn’t_ want to have the sight of Locus’ penis burned into their memories?

Wash stared down at the drain, vaguely hoping that that mental image would be flushed from his body along with the sweat, blood, and tears. Because he was a mature adult, not someone who needed to think about how _surprisingly_ _well-manscaped_ Locus obviously was.

Well, _now_ he’d fucked up. Trying very hard not to think about something had, somehow, lead to him thinking even more about said thing. The only thing left was a Hail Mary gambit to get his brain focused on other things.

Wash cleared his throat. “You know, Locus, I’m _almost_ getting used to seeing you out of your armor,” he began, still staring steadfastly at the tiled wall in front of him. And that _was_ true. For a man who’d taken his _nom de guerre_ from the armor he wore, Locus seemed to be increasingly comfortable out of it. Sure, he’d scared the living bejeezus out of Wash the first time he’d popped up without his helmet on, but Wash had acclimatized pretty quickly after that. It was nice, seeing Locus achieve, if not _normalcy_ , then at least _marginally less weird armor fetishizing_. “I honestly think you look better out of it.”

There. Totally normal conversation, talking about Locus’ emotional development in a mature and respectful manner. Absolutely nothing that could be construed as having some sort of sexual subtext or-

Inside his mind, Washington screamed.

Locus, to either his credit or ignorance, ignored Wash’s inner agony. “As both you yourself and Agent Carolina have pointed out, the armor can be something of a liability. It is too conspicuous to be used on many of our assignments. I also developed something of a…” Locus paused for a second “.... _dependency_ on it, you might say. One I have been working to overcome.”

That was actually so sincere and heartfelt that Washington momentarily forgot about trying to forget Locus’ penis. He just glanced over his shoulder, feeling some strange semblance of… _empathy?_

Wash turned to face Locus, but the other man was still facing the wall. He’d let his hair down, Wash belatedly realized, and the mane of his ponytail could’ve given Carolina’s a run for its money. He was in the middle of washing it out with some sort of shampoo, fingers massaging his scalp. Most soldiers Wash knew, both men and women, kept their hair cut short to avoid dealing with the kind of maintenance sixteen hours in a helmet demanded. It was curious that Carolina and Locus were both exceptions to that rule.

“You normally like to keep your workouts pretty short, Locus?” Wash asked, his brain finding words to put through his mouth.

Locus seemed to shrug. “No. I generally prefer longer sessions, interspersed with hand-to-hand and CQC drills,” he answered, managing not to sound like a psychopath as he did. There was a long pause. “But I got the impression that I was making that young girl uncomfortable. Given that she is a patient, and I am a merely guest, I decided to cut my session short.”

Wash realized he hadn’t turned back to face his nice little slab of wall. He had, in fact, just continued to watch Locus lather and rinse, all while the man delivered a short speech in a deep, baritone voice. And then realized that _he_ was suddenly feeling uncomfortable. Right between the legs. Very _firmly_ uncomfortable.

Which was, frankly, bullshit. He didn’t _hate_ Locus, not really, but they _had_ tried to kill each other, which Wash usually considered a pretty big turn-off, right up there with people who bit their nails. Not that Locus wasn’t an attractive guy, once you got him out of his armor, but the galaxy was full of attractive men who _hadn’t_ committed any war crimes lately. So it was probably just hormones. That made more sense. Carolina had been gone for over a week, and he hadn’t masturbated in about as long, and that teasing kiss of hers had probably just gotten him all riled up.

Yes. That made _much_ more sense than his greatest middle school nightmare finally coming to life between his legs.

* * *

There were so. Many. Tests.

Currently they were on the fMRI. June was injected with deoxyhemoglobin - literally hemoglobin without the oxygen - which made its way through her circulatory system and across the blood-brain barrier. Once inside, the four unpaired electrons that accompanied each deoxyhemoglobin ion started excitedly interacting with the iron atoms in each blood cell, thereby producing an electrical signal powerful enough for the magnetic resonance imager to detect. As different parts of June’s brain got busier, they drew more magnetically charged blood through the cerebral arteries, allowing an _extremely_ proprietary software suite to make an educated guess as to what was happening in her head.

“How do you feel?” Dr. Grey asked, her voice piped through speakers built into the cylindrical MRI scanner.

June fought the urge to turn her head and face the speaker, if only because she’d been told that more movement meant more time in the machine. “A little cold,” she answered, moving as little of her head as she could manage. The hospital gown didn’t exactly provide much in the way of insulation.

“I _know_ right?” Grey’s voice boomed back. “I have a hypothesis that Doctor Goto, in Endo, has been fucking with the thermostats in an attempt to steal my job. I don’t have enough data yet, but when I do…”

June closed her eyes, and wondered what the others were up to.

* * *

At first, the sight of a man with a gun in the changeroom caused Washington to relax. This was _so obviously_ a nightmare. Which meant he didn’t _actually_ have to worry about hiding his - _entirely involuntary!_ \- erection from the tall, naked, soaking wet killing machine not five feet away from him.

“You two - don’t move, and you won’t get hurt!” the man barked, his gun bouncing between Wash and Locus.

Except that didn’t sound like dream dialogue.

“What do you want?” asked Locus. He raised his hands slightly as he spoke, but his voice was a menacing _growl_.

“Nothing that concerns you,” the gunman sniped back. “Now both of you, turn around and-”

Ah, fuck it.

“ _Think fast, asshole_ ,” Wash yelled. As he spoke, the bar of Irish Spring soap had already left his hand.

The sudsy slug hit the gunman square in the face, causing him to let out a startled _yelp_ of surprise. He instinctively wiped his eyes with the sleeve of his jacket, then took a half-step forward, squaring his feet to shoot.

Un/fortunately, that half-step caused him to plant his foot _right on_ the bar of soap that had just hit him in the face. Half-blind and entirely off-balance, the gunman’s foot flew out from under him, and his head hit the ceramic floor with a sickening _crack_.

Locus was already on him, finishing the work that gravity had started. Wash saw the gunman try to aim his pistol, but Locus was too fast, trapping his assailant’s arm in his own, using an old martial arts pin to hyperextend the elbow and then dislocate the shoulder. The gun fell from a limp hand to the floor.

Locus quickly collected the pistol, sliding out the cartridge to count the bullets and then quickly locking it back into place. He was panting slightly, and still dripping from his shower, which had continued to spray water with indifference to the melee. He faced Wash dead-on, locking eyes.

“We should move.”

Wash nodded in agreement, and offered a wordless thanks to his penis for having gone flaccid.

* * *

“Hm, having trouble getting these last images to load because our computer network appears to be a _teensy bit_ entirely offline,” Grey said, poking at the touchscreen of her monitor.

“Why’s that?” June asked, more to make conversation than out of any genuine interest. She was sitting with her legs dangling off the edge of the examination bed in Grey’s clinic, and had been for the past half-hour as Doctor Grey _oohed_ and _aahed_ and _cackled_ as various test results streamed into her terminal. June was keeping herself amused with a small surgical scalpel she’d found in one of the room’s drawers, which she was trying to learn how to twirl in her fingers without slicing her wrist open.

Which was hard to do, because she felt like she was being watched. Grey had one of those old-timey medical skeletons in her office, and it was positioned directly across from June. Which was creepy enough. What was even _creepier_ was the fact that the jaw was open and the head tilted back, making it look like the skeleton was laughing at her.

“ _Probably_ because most of the hospital is running on pirated software and someone back on Earth finally noticed,” Grey explained, amicably. “ _Or_ … it could be because our intranet has achieved Singularity and is rebelling against us!”

June dropped the scalpel. Suppressing a curse, she hopped off the bed, crouching low to the ground to pick it up without exposing her hospital-gown clad ass to Doctor Grey. While she was at ground-level, however, her eyes were drawn to the crack between the examination room’s floor and its door, and to the shadows of two men that had just appeared along it.

She went completely still, completely silent, as she watched two pairs of feet rearrange themselves. _Getting into position_. She dared a glance over her shoulder, at Doctor Grey, who seemed to recognize the expression on June’s face instantly. Of course she did, she’d been through years of hell during the Civil War. She would recognize genuine fear when she saw it.

The door was kicked opened, and June narrowly managed to roll out of the way as two men burst into the room, guns drawn. The clinic was small, almost cramped, with June crouched in one corner, and Doctor Grey standing at the other, still hunched over her computer. It should have been a turkey shoot.

The first shot went through a skull, but it was the anatomical skeleton that took the hit, the bullet passing straight through his polyvinyl cranium and into a jar of cotton swabs beside Grey. Or rather, right beside where Grey _had_ been. She spun as she ran towards the nearest shooter, adding centripetal force to the clipboard that she slammed into the man’s head. He stumbled sideways, into the counter, but Grey had already slipped inside his reach, using his body as a human shield against the second shooter.

There wasn’t enough room for the other gunman to maneuver around his co-attacker. Grey was grappling with the man, keeping herself close against him, trying to keep her balance against his significantly greater mass. Her head poked out around one side, taking in the second gunman.

The second gunman tried to shoot her. He missed.

The man Grey was grappling with screamed in pain as a bullet pierced his side. He toppled forward, dropping his gun as he staggered. Grey tried to duck and grab it, but the man collapsed literally on top of her, two-hundred and fifty pounds of _weight_ keeping her pinned to the floor. His body absorbed two more bullets that were meant for her, causing Grey to let out an involuntary shriek. She reached for the pistol, which had fallen underneath the examination table. A fourth bullet exploded between it and her hand, causing her to reflexively snap it back to her chest.

She briefly considered that she was going to die. Of a GSW. Which was just plain _boring_. And then-

\- there was a scream of pain. Not from Grey, but from the man doing his damndest to kill her. Grey managed to wiggle her way out from under the ballistically-punctuated body, grunting from the effort.

Just in time to see June, holding a surgical scalpel. Actually, all Grey could see was June’s fist, which completely enveloped the handle. Because the blade had vanished into the gunman’s eye and wedged itself pretty darn deep into his cerebral cortex.

Grey cast a mournful glance at the DAYS WITHOUT AN IMPALEMENT sign, and flipped the numbers back to zero.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> @Rooster Teeth please stop putting quirky, over-the-top characters in your shows I keep telling you I don’t know how to write them.
> 
> I spent far too much time learning about how to use x-rays to determine age to acknowledge that we’ll probably use different technology in the future. Most (though not all) of the information is adapted from:
> 
> Norouzi M, Hanafi MQ, Gharibvand MM. Computed tomography-based age estimation of illiac crests calcification in 10-29 year-old individuals. J Family Med Prim Care [serial online] 2019 [cited 2019 Aug 3];8:1947-52. Available from: <http://www.jfmpc.com/text.asp?2019/8/6/1947/261446>
> 
> As always, any feedback, criticisms, interpretations, or suggestions are welcome in the comments.


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